One Sorry Mess
David Antrobus Posted on Friday, May 2, 2014 at 9:04PM 
More flash fiction. I posted this to Mader's blog again tonight, but honestly, I think this is worthy of an instant rerun, purely because not only does it bleed atmosphere and mood, but it also has a plot—the one area as a fiction writer I need to especially keep working on.
I realise lately I've been attempting to capture the music of American dialect. Its rhythms and melodies, its odd cadence. Not claiming to have gotten it right yet, but each time I do this I hear something new and feel something that frees up my language.
In case anyone's wondering, the setting for this tiny tale is a place called Big Timber, Montana. I stayed there one night, in September 2011. It was actually magical in its low key way, got under my skin. Here it is:
"Supposed to be a rainstorm tonight."
Heading west somewhere past Billings, the only light from a mostly cloudless, deepening ink-blue sky showed up like neon contrails on the railroad tracks. We sat in a diner that squatted like a timid brown bug between those tracks and the interstate, our immediate view a patchwork of choked grass and fast-food trash and signs saying shit like "For Sale 13+ Acres 2 Homes" while dry lightning played in the Crazy Mountains way off. People oughta know something: desperation, like ozone, has a smell.
Those booths were the worst damn booths I ever sat in. Might as well sit on old rusty machine parts wrapped in thin pleather. Or dry bones cold inside ancient skin.
"Well I don't see no storm."
"Then let's keep going."
We paid the squint-eyed girl at the register, even tipped her an undeserved single. Way she looked at Casey made me smile. Like she wanted someone—may's well been him, may's well been Charlie fuckin' Starkweather—to take her out of that town for all eternity and not ever look back.
Turns out we shoulda stayed, even in a fleabit motel the kind you barely ever see no more, since the storm come in after all, and if we hadn't been where we were, we also wouldn't been on I-90 some twenty miles east of Butte when that oncoming 18-wheeler with the sleeping trucker crossed the median in near-slow-motion and took out the RV right in front of us. As well as us. Buncha others too.
My last memories are a compact import pumping blood like a profane heart over a blacktop artery and a violent Montana sky alive with benjamins, fluttering like grey moths, hoping against hope to find some porch light somewhere and maybe settle.
What a waste.
One sorry fucking mess, to tell you the god's honest truth.